U.C. Berkeley Law School Clinic to Release Major New Report on the Growing Criminalization of Homeless People in California

February 19, 2015, 12 Noon at the State Capitol

On February 19, 2015, at noon on the north side of State Capitol in Sacramento, the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley will release a research report entitled “California’s New Vagrancy Laws: The Growing Enactment and Enforcement of Anti-Homeless Laws in the Golden State.” The study documents the increasing criminalization of homeless people in California through local laws mimicking shameful vagrancy laws of past eras that targeted people of color, migrants, and the physically disabled.

Clinic students from the law school and the school of public policy analyzed municipal codes in 58 California cities, where three-quarters of California’s homeless people reside. They also gathered public records and interviewed key stakeholders in a sample of cities to study enforcement practices across the state.

A  chart from the forthcoming report, will display municipal laws that target or disproportionately impact homeless people have risen sharply in recent decades. In every city studied, local laws are used to cite, arrest, and jail homeless people for daytime activities like standing, sitting, or resting in public places. And in all but one city, such laws ban nighttime activities like sleeping, camping, or lodging in public places, including in vehicles.

According to the clinic students, who prepared the report on behalf of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), “Since contemporary homelessness emerged in the early 1980s—when the state and federal government disinvested from affordable housing and other social services—California cities have been engaged in a race to the bottom by increasing criminalization, hoping to drive homeless people away and make them someone else’s problem.”

WRAP Executive Director Paul Boden praises the report’s significance, even as he laments its findings: “This is a major contribution to our understanding of how California cities have responded to homeless people. It’s all too reminiscent of Jim Crow, sundown town, anti-Okie, and ‘ugly’ laws that targeted marginalized groups, and it confirms our own street outreach surveys of hundreds of homeless people, who are increasingly harassed and punished for their mere presence in public.”

By comparing the in-depth California data to national figures gathered by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, the report finds that California cities have more anti-homeless laws on average than cities in other states. Further, as described in case studies from San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego, local authorities deploy a wide variety of enforcement strategies to punish homeless people. Statewide arrest trends suggest these enforcement priorities are increasingly based on people’s status—being homeless—and not on behaviors, like drunkenness and disorderly conduct, raising troubling constitutional questions about these laws and their purpose.

Clinic director and law professor Jeffrey Selbin says all of these trends point in one direction: “When considered together, our research findings clearly suggest that only a concerted statewide effort will end this expensive and inhumane whack-a-mole approach to homelessness in California. The state must protect the basic right of homeless people to engage in life-sustaining activities and redirect enforcement resources to proven approaches that address the root causes of homelessness and poverty.”